No film captures this cacophonous, almost desperate violence quite like Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008). A film that turned Liam Neeson from a serious dramatic actor into America’s favourite murder-dad. What I want to do here is look at one of Taken’s legacies. Specifically, I want to argue that Taken can be understood as a genre unto itself.

What does this mean, to say Taken is a genre? For starters, genres are ways we categorize works of art. Genres can be broad, like comedy or sci-fi. They can be more specific, like a ‘casino crime caper’ or ‘dystopian teenage romance’. In each case, what makes genres ‘genres’ is that these categories guide both creation and interpretation.^[1] So a movie being a comedy means both that the people making it were using the idea of “comedy” to guide their decisions, and the people watching it were using the idea of “comedy” to appreciate it. To say Taken is a genre, then, means that there are movies which can be understood as “Takens”. To appreciate these movies, it’s not enough to understand that they share features with Taken, but to view them as “a Taken.”

Later I’ll go over three particular Takens but first we need to set up just what a Taken is. If it’s a genre, what are its distinctive features? What does it take to be a Taken?

Taken

Let’s start with the plot, which is most famous for revolving around Liam Neeson as murder-dad Bryan Mills. Mills starts the movie as an ex Green Beret and CIA officer who has been reduced to working security because nobody needs him anymore; his wife has left him for another man and his daughter thinks he’s a loser. On a trip to Paris, his daughter and her friend are kidnapped by vaguely-ethnic Albanian gangsters who plan to sell them into slavery. Mills delivers his famous monologue over the phone – “I will find you, and I will kill you” – and murders his way across Paris until he saves his daughter from a sheik straight out of Disney’s Aladdin. He wins back his daughter’s adoration, and gets her music lessons with the pop star he was bodyguarding for at the start of the movie.

But, of course, a movie is more than its plot. So let’s look at what makes this such a post-9/11 movie. Plenty is obvious on the surface: the special forces super soldier kicking into action to save his daughter from the ambiguously Middle Eastern bad guys (and doing so without the help of the hapless French). There’s more to it, though. As Susan Faludi noted in The Terror Dream, the American reaction to 9/11 involved trying to reinforce a particular kind of gender ideal. 9/11 was understood as a violation of the American domicile: the household inhabited by mother, father, and 2.3 children.

In reaction to this “violated domicile,” there was a cultural move to not just restore men to the forefront but restore the “paterfamilias”, the father-protector of the family who led and provided for the domicile. As Faludi notes, news pundits heralded 9/11 as an outright refutation of feminism: women in leadership had displaced (or worse) the manly men who protected America, and this led to America being attacked.^[2] Donald Rumsfeld heralded the return of “heroes,” great men who would not just defend the US but restore its (gendered) order.^[3] America’s opinion-makers agreed: the male id needed to be unleashed so that men could re-take their position as leaders and defenders of the family order.^[4]

All of this is not just found in Taken, but is essential to making it what it is. Mills, the ex-special forces guy, has been left adrift after his skills were no longer needed in the 90s peace. His ex-wife has decided that he’s a relic and left him for a soft, suburban man. The vaguely-ethnic bad guys upset the domicile by kidnapping his daughter; the fight is ultimately over control of his daughter, with the looming threat of her being sold as a sex slave to the Sheik. The movie ends, of course, with Mills heroically killing all the bad guys, winning back his daughter, and restoring the domicile.

Looking at Taken as a genre, then, isn’t just about the plot. It’s about Taken as a story of restoring order to a violated domicile by setting out into a dangerous and foreign world. And it’s all of that as part of the US’ collective emotional response to 9/11.

What I want to do now is look at three movies – The Grey, John Wick, and Pig – which show some of the interesting directions Takens have gone. These are far from the only instances, but they show the different directions the genre can go. And, from afar, can even show how the US has culturally developed since 9/11.

The Grey

The place to start is with The Grey, a movie released shortly enough after Taken that it not only starred Liam Neeson but was marketed as “Taken with wolves.” Neeson plays John Ottway, a hunter mourning the death of his wife, and who has to chaperone survivors to safety after their small plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. Their mission is made more difficult by the fact that they are pursued by a pack of hungry wolves.

There are some obvious differences, of course – here Ottway is leading a group of people, not retrieving his daughter – but the similarities are significant. Ottway’s character is defined by the tragic shattering of the domicile and he plays the paterfamilias-protector character going through a dangerous foreign land (in this case the wilderness). His motivation is to restore the domicile and playing the paterfamilias in the woods is his way of achieving that.

Where Taken is a glorious story of revenge and restoration, The Grey confronts the absurdity of death. Each human has a corresponding wolf, and the humans’ deaths are absurd and meaningless. The characters die when urinating, falling, slipping near a river. And each of these tragedies are, importantly, irreversible. Ottway’s character arc is about coming to terms with the meaninglessness of his wife’s death, and accepting that there really is nothing he can do.

In the acceptance of tragedy, it becomes clear how The Grey stands relative to Taken. The Grey takes the tragic shock of 9/11 and begins the process of reckoning with the fact that there maybe isn’t any greater justice to be had, and there’s no way to put back together what was broken. There’s no saving and reuniting the family; Ottway’s wife is dead and there’s nothing he can do about that. This is what makes The Grey a 'Taken', then. Not that it’s “Taken with wolves”, but because it takes the story, themes, and context of Taken, and uses them to make a new movie that has to be understood in the context of the original.

John Wick

The next Taken I want to look at has Keanu Reeves as the titular Wick, and came deep into the Obama era.

The plot is that Wick is a former super assassin who retired to marry and settle down. The story starts shortly after his wife has died; she had bought him a dog by which to remember her. A gang of criminals kills the dog while stealing Wick’s car, causing Wick to (literally) dig up his old assassins’ tools and go on a mission of revenge through an elaborately-imagined criminal underworld. This story is pointedly psychological, and is frequently read as a return to addiction. Wick got clean for his wife, and now he’s relapsing. So what makes this a Taken?

For one, this is a story of Wick, the man of his house, going on a mission of revenge after his domicile is violated. The dog is presented as his last connection to his wife, so in killing it, the villains are not just invading Wick’s house but tearing apart the nuclear family. The dangerous foreign land in this movie is a fantastical criminal underworld, complete with gold coins, codes of honour, and secret institutions. And it is pointedly very dangerous: anyone and everyone could be a secret assassin.

But where Taken and The Grey are deeply interested in politics, John Wick represents a retreat from politics into the psychological. As Graeber argues in The Utopia of Rules, this was typical of many superhero movies of the era, where the personal becomes subordinate to the personal and psychological.^[5] Taking The Dark Knight Rises as an example, Graeber notes how a story about a revolution in Gotham City – where Occupy-coded anarchist-terrorists take over the city and entomb the cops – is ultimately about Bruce Wayne the person learning to have healthy relationships with others.^[6] Despite using political images, the movie is not actually interested in revolution or justice or any other part of politics. That’s all window dressing for Bruce Wayne delving into his psyche.

Similar to The Dark Knight Rises, the fantastical criminal underworld of John Wick is merely flavour for the character Wick’s personal journey. The bad guys are still vaguely ethnic, but there is no symbolism or any other importance to their ethnicity. There’s no real politics of the household, with the domicile instead representing Wick’s personal normalcy. The dog represents his own personal health more than it does any familial integrity: by the end of the movie the dog is replaced, the new dog indicating that he’s at peace once again.

John Wick, then, isn’t a response to Taken like The Grey is. Rather, it’s a Taken for its era. It’s what happens when Taken is removed from the extremely politically-conscious, post-9/11 period, and re-created in an era where a sufficient number of people were no longer really paying attention to politics. The political world is gone. The social world is gone. John Wick is a Taken where the conflict is entirely within the individual.

Pig

Pig gives us Nicolas Cage as Robin Feld, a grieving hermit. Like The Grey it confronts the inevitability of death, but moves from the context of 9/11 to climate change. It combines grieving what has been lost with grieving what will be lost.

Feld – at first just “Rob” – lives in a small shack in the Oregon woods with his truffle pig, where he trades truffles to a luxury foods supplier, Amir, for baking supplies. One night people break in and steal his pig; he teams up with Amir to head into the city to retrieve it.

We learn of Feld’s past as an elite chef, and the dark underbelly of the luxury restaurant world. While Pig keeps the revenge structure of the other Takens, as Feld moves through his old foes, he pointedly avoids taking revenge. This culminates in a ‘showdown’ with Amir’s father Darius – the pig thief – where Feld recreates a meal he had previously cooked for Darius and his wife.

While not a man of violence like Mills or Wick, Rob is still the paterfamilias of a broken home. His home has fallen apart through him losing his wife and now his pig. Both Portland and the restaurant scene play the role of the dangerous foreign land. Rob even has Wick’s secret stash, though for him it’s strategically stored luxury ingredients.

The story centres on grief. At the beginning of the film Feld tries and fails to listen to a recording his late wife made for him. Amir’s mother, Darius’s wife, is in a comatose state but neither Amir or Darius can fully let go. Rob and Amir talk about catastrophe – tidal waves and eruptions – and how there’s no way to escape them. At the end of the movie they have an exchange about how if they’d never gone to look for the titular pig, Rob could’ve lived out his life imagining the pig was still alive. “Maybe,” he says, “but she’d still be dead.”

As with The Grey, this is a story about a nuclear family that cannot be put back together. Feld’s wife is dead, his pig is dead; he goes by his old house and the persimmon tree is gone. But for Pig, these things were always transient.

In Pig, everything is transient. A meal, of course, is an experience which immediately disappears into the past. Feld counsels a luxury chef who has abandoned his dream of running an English pub: “Every day you wake up and there will be less of you.” The time he’s invested in his restaurant has been spent wrongly. Even cities are temporary, Portland doomed to be destroyed by tidal wave, earthquake and volcano.

But we have what we value, and memory lets us hold on to what we value. Feld is able to return to his wife’s cassette. The meal lets Darius not only remember his wife but return to the good that he had with her. Even the discussion about the end of Portland ends with a mutual vow between Rob and Amir:

“Well I’m not fucking moving to Seattle.”

“Fuck Seattle.”

In its focus on transience, Pig is very much a Taken for a world that has moved from terrorism to climate change as the foremost imagined threat. Feld’s pig was stolen, but the biggest threat of the movie is the persistent decay of time of passing. This is a world where everything is coming to an end, and the only thing you can do is salvage what good you can in the time you have.

The foreign world, too, is not dangerous in its potential to be harmful but in how it represents the wrong paths in life. Pursuing power, fame, and money as superficial signifiers of status instead of finding what’s truly valuable.

Looking at Taken as a genre, then, isn’t just about the plot. It’s about Taken as a story about restoring order to a violated domicile by setting out into a dangerous and foreign world.

These are just a few standout examples of Takens. They show the different direction the genre has gone. Regular Takens are still being made, even starring Liam Neeson.^[7] The world, America especially, still loves its murder-dads murdering the family back together.

But looking at these examples gives us a way to understand (one) way the US has developed after 9/11. We begin with murdering the family back together, we move on to confronting the absurdity of death. With John Wick the story turns inwards, and lastly with Pig we get a connection to new political themes.

The transition of movies away from explicitly interrogating the meaning of 9/11 doesn’t mean that Taken is going to be left in the dust. There are still reasons to understand the US as a society reacting to 9/11. And, so long as that’s the case, there will be new Takens to be had.

References

• Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
• Friend, Stacie. Fiction as a Genre, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112/2 (2012), pp. 179-209.
• Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015).

Further Reading

For more of the cultural influences that went in to Taken, nothing comes close to The Terror Dream by Faludi (see above). The book was actually published before Taken was released, so you can think of the movie as a successful prediction by Faludi.

The movie’s pre-credit scene certainly does what it can to live up to its advertisements. We are introduced to Savant, alone with a rubber ball in an open-air jail cell. A bird lands in his cell and, instead of sympathising with it, he instantly kills it with his ball. The camera lingers on the bird’s viscera. We are then introduced to the rest of the initial suicide squad, a bunch of brightly coloured dipshits posing in front of an American flag. They are sent off to invade and overthrow Corto Maltese, a loose analogy of Cuba and Venezuela, as the workers of the government office bet which squad member will die first. Upon arriving, the squad are instantly cornered and killed in increasingly ridiculous ways. Savant, horrified by his team’s collapse, turns and flees which causes the bureaucrat Waller to detonate the bomb inside his head. A bird flies down and picks at the stump where Savant’s head used to be. The blood spells out “Warner Brothers presents.” Dark Humour.

A dark comedy having a moral core is nothing surprising. After all, the audience needs some way to side with the protagonists, and the morally uglier a movie is the more we feel like there has to be some point to it. However, The Suicide Squad goes beyond just having a moral core; it has a moralistic one. And I think this is striking, that a movie that revels in the graphic deaths of its characters could also end up with the tone of Helen Lovejoy’s pleading to “please think of the children”. Now, we could just dismiss this as sloppy writing, as if Gunn went for a simple message and ended up with a simplistic one. But I want to suggest that there’s something interesting going on, and that there’s a deep connection between dark humour and insipid morality.

When I say a movie has “insipid morality,” what I mean is that it presents a moral message that is trite and simplistic; is the sort of thing that would be presented as obvious common sense; and is made stupidly. For The Suicide Squad that insipid morality is an obsession with the purity of children. Much of the core team are understood either as children or in relation to children. Both Polkadot Man and Ratcatcher II are explicitly framed as children whose powers were created by their parents. King Shark, a simple-minded man-eating shark god, is defended by Ratcatcher II for being infantile. Team leader Bloodsport is motivated by the desire to protect his daughter. And Peacemaker… well, John Cena has always had a talent for looking like an overgrown toddler.

The Suicide Squad goes beyond just having a moral core; it has a moralistic one.

Characters often state a motivation to protect children. Harley Quinn kills the president of Corto Maltese after he mentions killing children and she calls that a “red flag” for a toxic relationship. The soldier Rick Flag repeatedly shouts “they experimented on children” in righteous anger. The heroes talk about defending all the innocent children from the mind-slaving starfish. And the office secretary declares “all those people, John. Little kids,” after she incapacitates the evil bureaucrat with a golf club. These declarations of innocence and purity confer a sense of innocence and purity to the protagonists, then, since they were defined as children.

This sort of moral triteness would be a tonal clash with most movies, but it stands out particularly in the context of dark humour. This is because dark humour is interested in transgressing not just moral norms, but all good taste. Take Savant’s brief arc. He kills the bird (moral transgression) and then the camera lingers on the viscera (taste transgression). The movie invites the audience to laugh at him panicking, fleeing, and dying. His arc concludes with his corpse being eaten by a small bird. The humour inheres in the moral and aesthetic ugliness.

There’s a similar dynamic in the characterization of Polka-Dot Man. The original Polka-Dot Man was simply an eccentric who hid devices inside of polka dots on his suit. In The Suicide Squad, the character is infected with an interdimensional cancer virus which manifests in gigantic pulsing multicoloured pustules all over his body. The humour comes both from that being disgusting and the fact that it’s using cancer as the basis of the joke. Often, dark humour targets the very idea of the good, with death itself being the punchline. Polka-Dot Man is killed at his first happy moment, good guy rebels are killed because the protagonists were careless, and there is a repeated joke about Harley Quinn not even knowing who the supporting character Milton was even after he was killed in front of her.

That dark humour is centred not just on the transgression of norms but on the transgression of all norms is, I think, the source of why it can lead to moral insipidity. This is because transgressions create a problem for trustworthiness. What I want to do now is give a brief account of trustworthiness and explain how it gets undermined by dark humour. I’ll then show how insipid morality can be understood as an attempt to restore trustworthiness.

There are two ways to understand someone being trustworthy. The first is just that she is the sort of person who can be trusted.^[1] This can mean we trust them in general, but usually trust is particular to certain specific things (“domains” in technical-speak). A stranger may seem trustworthy for me to ask them to keep an eye on my bag while I use the washroom, but I wouldn’t have them take care of my home while I’m away. Another way of understanding trustworthiness is through commitments: a trustworthy person is a person who meets her commitments.^[2] These commitments are usually like promises, so if a trustworthy person says she is going to do something, you can count on her doing it.

In each case, trustworthiness seems to fundamentally involve doing what you say you’re going to do. And here is where humour can be a problem, because humour can often involve talking a lot of nonsense. It’s accepted that when you’re joking you don’t mean what you say, thus the phrase “I’m just joking.” The more you don’t mean what you say, the harder it is for me to count on you to do what you say you’re going to do. The more nonsense you talk, the less connection there is between what you say and what you do. The less connection there between what you say and what you do, the less I can take what you say to be an indication of what you’ll do.

Normally we only joke about certain things, and in certain circumstances. I’ll more readily talk about misfortunate befalling me than you, and while I might say anything at the pub I wouldn’t say the same thing in an important meeting. I think trustworthiness makes sense of this: the more likely it is to matter what I say, the less I talk nonsense. The point at which it begins to matter what I say can be understood as (one of the) boundaries of morality and good taste that dark humour transgresses. Remember that dark humour works not only by joking about things beyond morality and good taste, but that crossing those boundaries is central to the jokes themselves. This is to say that when you’re practicing dark humour, you’re talking a lot of nonsense.

This sort of nonsense speak in dark humour poses an additional problem. Normally, if you want to transition from speaking nonsense to speaking seriously, you do something to make clear that you’re now adhering to normal conversational rules. Maybe you change your posture and tone of voice, or maybe you just change topics to something you wouldn’t joke about. But with dark humour, these boundaries themselves are the targets of humour, and so they’re harder to use to make yourself seem serious. Just as turning words to nonsense makes it harder for those words to be taken seriously, turning conventions to nonsense makes it harder for those conventions to be taken seriously. And, as I mentioned earlier, dark humour often targets the very ideas of morality, goodness, and good taste. So not only are words and conventions reduced to nonsense, but so too is the very idea of the good.

If the very idea of morality seems like nonsense coming from you, how do you reestablish that you’re still a good person? Or, at least, not a bad one? If the worry is that the boundaries of good taste have become murky, then the solution can be to redraw them—or at least the ones that matter—as brightly as possible. Here is where moral insipidity starts to come in. Brightly drawn, obvious moral lines to let everyone know that, when it’s important, they can still count on you. But that’s not a full answer. Brightly drawn boundaries can fit with more sophisticated morality too. So why does dark humour lend itself to the insipid? Here are three suggestions.

One possibility I want to reject is that moral insipidity is just a narrative contrivance, to find one final boundary between the heroes and the villains of the story. This may sometimes be the case, but I think there’s also something particular to dark humour. And, also, I think what I’m about to say about moral insipidity goes further than just movies. For one example, I think it helps to explain parts of QAnon, or other forms of conspiracism which are obsessed with the purity and innocence of children.

To start, if the goal is trustworthiness, then that thing re-establishing trustworthiness has to be fundamental. That moral core has to be an absolute moral core, which creates enough moral gravity to ground everything else. This determines insipid morality’s inflexibility. Whenever a character in The Suicide Squad implores us to think of the children, that’s never expanded upon. The only children ever seen, in fact, are Bloodsport’s teenaged daughter and the metaphorical children of the squad. The children we’re being told to think of remain entirely abstract. They’re simply “the children”: some kind of universal absolute. This absoluteness confers reliability, meaning that when it comes to thinking of the children, you can count on the dark humourist.

This absoluteness relates to a second, closely related feature of insipid morality, which is that it has to establish the priority of the moral boundaries in question. Dark humour indulges in transgressing moral boundaries, so any boundary that has to be observed has to be more important than the others. It has to be okay to violate those other boundaries but not this one. If The Suicide Squad invites us to laugh at death, failed attempts at meaning, and the emptiness of the good, then that last inviolable moral boundary has to be placed above life, meaning, and the good.

Insipid morality… is not so much a result of undermining morality as it is a result of trying to reconstruct it.

Lastly, something has to ground that priority and that is a sense of purity. In the genre of dark humour, nearly every boundary is transgressed in the name of humour and nonsense. If the insipid morality is to work to establish trustworthiness, then it has to be free of that meaning- and morality-undermining nonsense. This means it has to stay pure. The priority of thinking of the children, then, finds itself not in that children have potential, or that they are part of a society, or even that they are human, for these boundaries have been transgressed. Rather, The Suicide Squad thinks of the children because the children have been untouched by the darkness of the rest of the movie. The purity of children, then, is free of trustworthiness-undermining nonsense.

These three factors together don’t strictly determine insipid morality. I think it is possible to have moral principles centred on absoluteness, priority, and purity that aren’t necessarily stupid. (Well, I might be a bit surprised if there was a non-stupid morality based on purity.) But, when dark humour does lead to insipid morality, I think this is the path that it travels. And, since the problem of trustworthiness is one that dark humour faces, we should expect dark humour to lead to insipidity fairly often. It’s an ironic conclusion—that transgressive humour should lead to trite, simplistic morality—but I think it’s easy enough to embrace. Insipid morality, if I’m right, is not so much a result of undermining morality as it is a result of trying to reconstruct it. And that’s maybe not the sort of task our darkest, most twisted minds are suited for.

References

• Hawley, Katherine. How to Be Trustworthy, (Oxford: OUP, 2020).
• Jones, Karen. Trustworthiness, Ethics, (2012).

Further Reading

A short overview of trust and trustworthiness can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on trust.

An introduction to humour, including a discussion of dark humour, can be found in Noel Carroll’s Humour: A Very Short Introduction.

And since I disagree deeply with Carroll, I will selfishly recommend the section on why we value humour from my own piece, The Social Account of Humour.

Free people may choose to sell themselves into slavery to provide for their families. Those slaves who are purchased by the Imperium itself rather than private individuals are called Servus Publicus, or state-owned slaves…^[1]

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, a codex entry notes of the servus publicus that they “do all the tasks proper citizens will not.”^[2] Tevinter mage and oft-beloved party member Dorian paints a rosier picture:

Dorian: In the south you have alienages, slums both alien and elven. The desperate have no way out. Back home, a poor man can sell himself. As a slave he could have a position of respect, comfort, and could even support a family. Some slaves are treated poorly, it’s true, but do you honestly think inescapable poverty is better?

Inquisitor: At least they’re free. They don’t have slavery forced on them.

Dorian: You think people choose to be poor and oppressed? I doubt it…

A similar conversation crops up in Mass Effect 2 on the planet Illium:

Shepard: I can’t believe an asari world would allow slavery!

Concierge: We try to avoid calling it slavery. All indentured servants on Illium have voluntarily agreed to a term of service. Most choose indentured service as a means to pay off debt or avoid imprisonment. A contract holder is responsible for the well-being of her servants, and a servant’s duties are agreed upon before the contract is signed.

The reality is less sanitised – as the player walks around Illium, an ad for a company called ‘IndentureTech’ plays in the background:

You’ve been a slave to your employees for too long. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?

In these examples, enforced slavery is distinguished from voluntary slavery. In what follows, we consider whether volunteering makes a moral difference.

For the purpose of our discussion, we can ask of the Bioware examples two questions:

1. Do these examples ‘count’ as slavery?
2. Does the putative voluntariness make a difference?

With regards to (1), one possible response is that indentured servitude standardly comes with limiting conditions built-in: you have to work to pay back x amount of money, or for y years, or until z event. Looked at this way, indentured servitude might be thought of as being more like an exceptionally onerous employment contract than like slavery – there are difficult conditions attached to escaping them, but it’s possible (by design). The indentured servant gives ten years’ service and is free; the volunteer army recruit gives three (or five, or seven) years’ service and is free. It’s not even unusual for there to be very punitive clauses dealing with what happens if the contract’s broken. So perhaps we should just think of indentured servitude as being high-risk (and, uh, low-reward) employment: if you don’t want to take the risk, don’t take the job. The invisible hand of the market solves the problem once again!

Well, no. As it happens, there are good reasons to think of lots of modern employment contracts as forms of indentured servitude, including the ones given above – but that just means that many more people are in effect in servitude than we usually think.^[3] This isn’t quite to re-assert the old claim that wage labour is slave labour, but it should make us wary of going “well really it’s just like being a wage labourer under capitalism, so obviously indentured servitude isn’t like slavery”.^[4] Rather, it should suggest to us that if there is a relevant distinction between waged labour, indentured servitude, and slavery, it’s not (or not primarily) to do with how difficult it is to escape the respective conditions or even the consequences of doing so.

Instead, we might think the crucial difference is to do with power and power structures: specifically, the extent to which one’s freedom or ability to do otherwise than the boss says is a matter of structural power (im)balances. Let’s take two simplified cases.

Case 1: Kim Kitsuragi is employed by RCM as a police lieutenant. There are certain restrictions on what Kim may do at work, and on how many hours a week Kim can spend out of work. These restrictions are built into Kim’s contract.

Case 2: Crypti is a slave on a cocaine plantation on the Irmalan Plateau. There are restrictions on what Crypti may do at work, and how many hours a week Crypti can spend out of work; there are also restrictions on where Crypti may live, who they may see, probably who they may have intimate relationships or children with. These restrictions may or may not be formalised.

Crypti is situated such that by design their life is vulnerable to arbitrary interference at the whim of another – in the philosophical jargon, they’re dominated (see Pettit 1996; 1997). It’s not just that somebody could interfere with their life, it’s that the social structures they inhabit are designed to make this possible. Conversely, the social structures that Kim inhabits are designed to limit how much his employer can interfere with his life. These structures might be – are likely to be – imperfect.^[5] Still, their explicit goal is to make sure that Kim is able to make his own decisions not only about how to do his job, but more importantly whether or not to do his job at all. Kim is non-dominated, while Crypti is dominated – and they seem to be dominated in just the way that the people in the Bioware examples are dominated (a servus publicus cannot choose to become a merchant instead).

So we have reason to think that Tevinter and IndentureTech are indeed engaging in slavery, and can turn to the second question: Does volunteering make a difference?

To answer this question, it helps to think about autonomy. What you conclude will depend on whether you think of autonomy primarily as a matter of knowing what you want to do; of doing what you want to do with your life; or of being able to control how your life goes.^[6] Let’s consider each of these in turn.

Taking the first line, we find people like Frankfurt (1971) and Dworkin (1976; 1981). According to them, autonomy is – very roughly – a matter of endorsing your first-order desires at a higher-order level. Say you have some first-order, world-facing desire, like “I want a pint”. If you want this desire to be effective – if you endorse its efficacy at a higher-order level – then according to them you’re autonomous. Under this view autonomy is a psychological matter, one to do with the efficacy of the “deep” or “true” self over its first-order desires. So long as the enslaved agent continues to endorse those desires that point them in the direction of slavery, it is indeed conceptually possible to be an autonomous slave.^[7]

Regardless of whether you think this is convincing in the slave case, there are reasons to be suspicious of structuralist views. Suppose that a Tevinter woman becomes a servus publicus, reasoning that it is the best (and perhaps only) way to save her family from poverty, but feels considerable grief at the loss of her former freedom. In other words, she has a first-order desire to be free, but endorses her servitude at a higher-order level. Marilyn Friedman (1986: 31) pointed out that on views like Frankfurt’s and Dworkin’s, the servus publicus would be made more autonomous by rejecting

 “her frustration grief and depression, and the motivations to change her life which spring from these sources…[and which] may be her only reliable guides.”^[8]

That is, supposing that she still endorses the servitude, still “wants to want” to be a good servant, then under the structuralist model she would become more autonomous by squashing the desire to chib the overseer, set fire to the big house and run like hell for a less constrained life. This seems – to use the technical term – exactly bass-ackwards to Friedman. Thinking about why might be illuminating.

Generally, we think of autonomous agents as not merely knowing (more or less) what they want out of life, but also being able (more or less) to get it. In Friedman-type cases, though, it seems not only that you can become more autonomous by subordinating what you want to some pre-existent conception of what you should want, but also that whether you get what you want is irrelevant to whether you’re autonomous.

“You think people choose to be poor and oppressed? I doubt it…”

A response might be to invoke what’s called procedural independence, in other words, that how you form your desires is important too. The procedural independence theorist is likely to say of the voluntary slave that something is amiss with how they’ve formed the desires to be subservient – faced with the choice between slavery or starvation, the person is making choices that, because of the pressure, don’t represent who they “really” are. This may well be true in lots of cases, but i) we ought to be careful of suggesting that people aren’t competent over their own desires, and ii) it still doesn’t evade the problem that so long as your desires line up right -  or have been/can be subjected to critical thought - whether they’re met doesn’t matter for autonomy. This seems weird considering that “living a life of one’s own” is near-as-damnit the one-line gloss on what it is to be autonomous.

“Aha!” say proponents of what’re sometimes called the self-authorship family of views, “precisely! In these cases, your desires might represent the real you, but your life isn’t the life that you want, and so you’re not autonomous”. According to them, to be autonomous is to “decide for [yourself] what is valuable, and to live [your] life in accordance with that decision” (Colburn, 2010). On this view, so long as the agent has thought carefully and critically about what they want, then they are autonomous insofar as they get what they want. The same will apply for the person who wants to be enslaved. Again, almost nobody thinks that this is likely, but it’s a conceptual possibility: it is possible to be an autonomous slave, if the life of slavery is consistent with your decisions about what is valuable.

And, obviously, this explains why voluntariness is important: if you choose to x, under conditions of procedural independence, then it seems fairly safe to say that x-ing represents what you want out of life – that you’ve decided for yourself that x is valuable, and can now live in accordance with that decision. Under the views we’ve so far considered, then, the IndentureTech employee and the servus publicus could be autonomous, although it’s unlikely.

The relational view offers a different analysis.^[9] On this view, what it is to be autonomous is to be (more or less) in control of your life – to be socially situated such that your desires about life are taken seriously precisely because they’re your desires, and that you are able to pursue these desires. In other words, to be authoritative and powerful over the direction of your life. Someone who’s enslaved is not powerful over the direction of their life; definitionally, they’re vulnerable to interference at the whims of another.^[10] Under a relational account, then, the slave isn’t autonomous.

"You’ve been a slave to your employees for too long. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?"

Interestingly, this means that voluntariness doesn’t make a difference: you may very well have been autonomous when you decided to commit yourself to slavery, but once that’s happened you aren’t any longer. Imagine that you freely decide to be tied up. Once you’ve made the decision, your movements are restricted, and the duration of the restriction is now out of your control – hopefully you’ll be released if you ask to be, but you’re much more vulnerable than you were before the binding. Likewise, the servus publicus might have freely sold themselves, but can’t then change their mind and become a hairdresser instead.

That’s not to say that voluntariness doesn’t matter for relational theories. It’s clearly important for being powerful and authoritative that your choices are taken seriously, and so voluntariness is important. But it’s not a sufficient condition for autonomy – it’s not enough. Merely wanting to do something doesn’t mean that doing it makes you autonomous. Autonomy relationally construed is a social phenomenon, and so – perhaps counterintuitively – we’ve got really strong reasons to prevent some kinds of relations from obtaining. Voluntary or no, your boss having near-untrammelled power over how your life goes is not consistent with your being able to decide how your life goes.

As Dorian notes, “Abuse heaped on those without power isn’t limited” to slavery. But choosing slavery doesn’t mean that what’s ‘heaped on’ isn’t abuse.

References:

• Cohen, G. The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 12:1 (1983), pp. 3-33.
• Colburn, B. Autonomy and Liberalism (Routledge: New York, 2010).
• Dworkin, G. Autonomy and Behavior Control, The Hastings Center Report, 6:1 (1976), pp. 23-28.
• Frankfurt, H. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person, Journal of Philosophy, 68:1 (1971), pp. 5-20.
• Friedman, M. Autonomy and the Split-Level Self, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 24:1 (1986), pp. 19-35.
• Oshana, M. Personal Autonomy and Society, Journal of Social Philosophy, 29:1 (1998), pp. 81-102.
• Oshana, M. Personal Autonomy in Society (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2006).
• Pettit, P. Freedom as Anti-Power, Ethics, 106:3 (1996).
• Pettit, P. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford University Press: New York, 1997).

Further Reading

For more examples of in-text justifications for slavery, check out the TV Tropes page on "Happiness in Slavery".

To learn more about philosophical accounts of autonomy, you could start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on autonomy in moral and political philosophy and feminist perspectives on autonomy.

Bong Joon-Ho’s 2017 film Okja tells the story of a young Korean girl, Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun), trying to get her superpig Okja back from the Mirando corporation.

Along the way she crosses path with the activist group the Animal Liberation Front, who view Mirando’s superpig celebration as a way to unmask the corporation’s environmentally-friendly hypocrisy. The ALF’s plan is to humiliate both the corporation and its CEO Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton): for Lucy to change through the power of shame and embarrassment. What I want to do in this article is to talk a little bit about the power of shame and embarrassment as seen through the lens of Okja. This involves showing what can be accomplished through shame, but also what can’t.

So, first, what does the movie show us about Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation? After all, if shaming Lucy is an important part of this movie, then we have to establish what she’s being shamed for. Our introduction to both the corporation and its CEO begins with the first scene, and immediately suggests contrasts. Lucy Mirando, happy, upbeat, and dressed all in Apple-appropriate clean white addresses a group of journalists within a former industrial building. She announces a break from how her father used to run the company: he was a “terrible man,” who committed “atrocities” which stained the building’s walls “with the blood of fine working men.” In contrast, Lucy wants to signal a new commitment to “new core values” of “environment and life.”

To celebrate this new direction, she announces a competition and new product. They have discovered a new animal in South America: a superpig. These superpigs are an environmental wonder, consuming fewer resources and producing less waste.  They have carefully reproduced 26 of these superpigs and sent them around the world to be raised in accordance with different local, traditional farming techniques. The superpigs will then be visited by Dr. Johnny Wilcox (Jake Gyllenhaal), a character best described as 'David Attenborough by way of Waluigi', who will declare a winner for 'Best Superpig'.

This opening scene tells us a lot quickly about Mirando, both the person and the corporation. They’re trying to make a transition from old way to new ways. The old ways are rough and brutal, represented not just by Lucy’s words but the rough building the press conference takes place in. They’re industrial, based on an opposition between the bosses and the workers. In contrast, Lucy’s new ways are friendly, cooperative, environmentally- and globally-conscious. The dour functional industrialism of her father has been replaced by the smiling, clean and well-animated Mirando of the present.

From this description you can probably guess the ALF’s motivation, and how the plot initially progresses. They want to show that the new Mirando corporation is not so different from the old. They want to show that Lucy’s stated values of a happier, more environmentally friendly Mirando are nothing but talk. To achieve this, they attach a secret camera to Okja’s ear which records nefarious goings-on at Mirando’s headquarters, including a drunken Dr. Johnny torturing Okja. These recordings are then broadcast at Mirando’s superpig celebration in downtown New York, showing the world that Lucy’s kinder, gentler façade is all hypocrisy. The ALF’s plan is that this will shame and embarrass both Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation, and that this will further the ALF’s goal of a more just society for non-human animals. But why should shame and embarrassment be expected to accomplish that?

To understand how the ALF expected to achieve their goals, it helps to know a few things about emotions in general. The first is that emotions often have objects, which are what the emotions are about. So when I am afraid I am not merely afraid, but I am afraid of some awful animal lurking in the shadows. When I’m proud the source of my pride is an accomplishment, like writing this blog post. Second, emotions prompt a response of some sort. Pride leads you to stand a little taller and maybe push your chest out. Fear leads you to run away. The third is that emotional experiences direct our attention at the object, and prompt us to search for reasons why that reaction might be well-founded. Returning to the fear example, the fear keeps my attention on the animal and prompts me to see whether or not it’s dangerous. If the animal is a ravenous wolf, then my fear is well-founded because the wolf is dangerous to me; if the animal is a hapless mouse then my fear is not well-founded because it’s not dangerous to me. This indicates a fourth thing about emotions, which is that what they have us looking for in the object is evaluatively important. So the fear leads me to evaluate the mouse as dangerous, and the pride leads me to evaluate writing this blog post as an accomplishment worth feeling good about. This evaluative characteristic of emotions is so important that some theorists have argued that emotions are a special kind of perception specifically for perceiving evaluative properties, though that’s not important for us now.^[1] What’s important is that emotions have an object (they are about something), and they lead us to focus on this object and look for reasons which support that emotion’s relevant evaluation, and respond appropriately. Now let’s apply that to shame and embarrassment.

Shame and embarrassment are emotions we feel when we’ve done something wrong. There’s some disagreement as to whether they are genuinely different emotions, or just the same emotion experienced at different levels of intensity.^[2] For the sake of this post and conceptual cleanliness, let’s stipulate a difference: embarrassment is for when you’ve done something wrong in the context of etiquette. It’s a social offence, but merely a faux pas. The sort of thing you’d probably feel comfortable laughing about if it happened to someone else. Shame, on the other hand, is for when you’ve committed a moral offence. These aren’t merely violations of etiquette, but instances of having done something seriously wrong.

If shame and embarrassment are about having done something wrong, then what they’re about — their object — is the thing we feel we’ve done wrong. We feel small and shrink away; where pride has us stand tall and beam, with shame and embarrassment we have trouble meeting people’s gaze. In fact, as with fear, there’s often the urge to run away from the social situation entirely. And, lastly, the reasons embarrassment and shame have us looking for are going to what made our action wrong. If embarrassing, which social rules did we violate? If shameful, what moral rules did we transgress?

Lucy’s new ways are friendly, cooperative, environmentally- and globally-conscious.

Understanding shame and embarrassment in this way, we can see more of what the ALF was trying to achieve. First of all, by shaming Lucy Mirando they aimed to make her confront that her actions were morally wrong, especially  that the cruelty Mirando corporation was inflicting on animals was wrong and needed to be stopped. Even if Lucy was not necessarily susceptible to shame, the ALF also targeted her for embarrassment by showing her hypocrisy. She was failing to live up to her own ideals of a happier, friendlier Mirando corporation. Both of these reactions would be helped along by public outrage, a loud and vocal public who also see Mirando corporation as shameful and Lucy as embarrassed. This would ideally result in the behavioural effects of shame and embarrassment: Lucy Mirando and the Mirando corporation going away. So, how does that work out?

This is where the movie gets particularly interesting, and where Bong shows us what he thinks of as the limits of shame’s political usefulness.

Throughout the movie Lucy has been taunted in conversation by her sister Nancy. After the calamity at the superpig festival we finally meet Nancy to discover that she (also played by Tilda Swinton) is Lucy’s identical twin. But where Lucy is happy, upbeat, and defined by clean light colours Nancy is dark, scowling behind sunglasses, and wearing earth tones. She even talks with a growl as she tells Lucy that the board has decided to put Nancy in charge. Nancy’s first order of business? Ignore all press and send all the superpigs to the slaughter. Once the product is out, people won’t care how it got there if it’s cheap. Even Okja, the prize-winning best superpig is ordered slaughtered. Why? In Nancy’s words, “we can only sell the dead ones.”

The climax of the movie takes places at the slaughterhouse as Mija, along with Jay (Paul Dano) and K (Steve Yeun) of the ALF rush to save Okja from slaughter. Jay and K are caught by security and escorted out, just as Nancy arrives to oversee the start of the plant’s operations. They yell at her that she should be ashamed, but she doesn’t care. She first responds by shouting “fuck off! We’re proud of what we accomplish,” before eventually settling into apathy. Ultimately, she doesn’t care what Jay and K have to say. Mija does manage to save Okja, but only by bartering Nancy a golden pig in exchange. “Our first sale,” Nancy triumphantly declares, as she drops the golden pig in her pocket.

Shame, obviously, has no power over Nancy. Or, at least, Jay and K have no ability to shame her. She doesn’t care about their attempts to shame her because she doesn’t care about their standards, and they have no ability to make her care about their standards. She is not immoral so much as she’s amoral, a creature of pure capitalism pursuing profit and profit alone. This shows us one limitation of shame and embarrassment: they are social emotions that ultimately rely on the compliance of the person who would be shamed or embarrassed. If they’re not willing to correct their behaviour of their own volition, you need something extra to make them comply. But there’s more, too.

Once the product is out, people won’t care how it got there if it’s cheap.

Remember that Lucy and Nancy are identical twins, and the corporation carries their name. The ALF aren’t just trying to take on Lucy Mirando, they’re trying to take on the whole corporation. But in using the tactics of shame and embarrassment they can only defeat the part of Mirando that is susceptible to shame and embarrassment. That’s Lucy, who wants to do things better: friendlier, more eco-conscious, more animal friendly. But those features of Lucy, those parts that make her susceptible to shame, are not what the ALF is seeking to target. This leads to what Bong shows us in the film: the friendliness, the ecological consciousness, the general desire to ‘be better’ is simply jettisoned. The crude industrial mechanisms which grind everything to dust for profit persist.

Feeling shame and embarrassment is a pretty important part of living together. It’s a key part of treating each other better, and respecting the standards of others. But, Bong reminds us, this is deeply limited. It leads us to being better people, but the problems plaguing the world are deeper than the transgressions of people trying to be good. Mija may learn to be a vegetarian, but the Mirando machine grinds on. This is perhaps why Bong ends the movie where he does: with Jay and K leaving prison. They meet up with other members of the ALF on a bus before masking up for their next mission. The fight’s not done. We go again.

Further Reading:

If you want to read more about how emotions direct our attention and lead us to search for reasons, check out Michael Brady’s Emotional Insight (2013).

For more on emotions and evaluation, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is good as always. See sections 5, 6 and 7 of their page on emotions.

Lockhart is the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We are first introduced to him at Flourish and Blotts, the bookshop in Diagon Alley where Harry, Hermione and the Weasleys are shopping for textbooks for their second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.^[1]

A prolific author, repeated winner of Witch Weekly’s Most Charming Smile Award, and widely considered a heartthrob (looking at you, Molly Weasley), Lockhart is obviously vain but also appears – at first – to be reasonably competent. His books detail his many great achievements: his defeat of the Wagga Wagga Werewolf, his triumph over the Bandon Banshee, and so on.

Alas, the shine quickly wears off, and as the year progresses his ineptitude becomes obvious.

But if he’s so inept, why consider him a killer? He didn’t bludgeon the banshee, or whack the werewolf. Indeed, none of his adventures actually occurred! He’s a liar, maybe, but a murderer?

Let’s step back from Gilderoy for a moment.

In an earlier article, I wrote about persistence and personal identity:

What makes you, you? What could be changed or removed and still leave the ‘youness’ intact? …[W]hat is it that enables you to persist, despite the changes you’ve undergone, from one day to the next?

One of the possibilities I considered was material continuity: in short, that having the same body – or the relevant bits of the same body – is what makes you, you. But early in the Harry Potter series we see that, in the lore of the world Rowling has created, drastic changes to one’s body don’t undermine persistence. For instance, Polyjuice Potion allows one to assume the form of someone else, even if they are of a different gender or a drastically different age.

But we don’t think that Harry-and-Ron-polyjuiced-into-Crabbe-and-Goyle stop being Harry and Ron.  We’re not confused as to what’s happening, or worried that our heroes have disappeared. And this isn’t limited to swapping body parts for other human ones: at one point a Polyjuice mishap has Hermione turn into a catgirl.

So if it’s not material continuity that matters for persistence in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, then it must be something else. A plausible alternative is psychological continuity. The idea, roughly, is that it’s some feature of our psychological makeup that makes us the same person from one day to the next: what feature/s varies by account, but usually it involves some sort of inheritance of beliefs, preferences, dispositions and/or – crucially – memories. Whereas some might locate these features in the brain, in Harry Potter memory is located in the soul:

"You can exist without your soul, you know, as long as your brain and heart are still working. But you'll have no sense of self any more, no memory, no...anything. There's no chance at all of recovery. You just — exist. As an empty shell. And your soul is gone forever...lost."

Remus Lupin, in JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

(I take it that the ‘you’ Lupin is referring to is merely Harry’s body. And as we’ve seen, the body isn’t what’s relevant for full ‘youness’ in Harry Potter. We see another example with those summoned back from death with the Restoration Stone: despite not having physical brains or bodies, they retain the power to think and remember.)

Now Lockhart doesn’t remove souls, but he does tamper with memories. Lockhart has cultivated a single magical skill: Memory Charms. He entices people to tell him their stories and then takes those stories and passes them off as his own. Usually he is selective in which memories he ‘obliviates’ (and there is debate in the fandom about whether memory charms, properly cast, suppress or erase memories).^[2] But when confronted by Ron and Harry towards the end of Chamber of Secrets, his attempted erasure is much more significant:

'The adventure ends here, boys!' he said. 'I shall take a bit of this skin back up to the school, tell them I was too late to save the girl, and that you two tragically lost your minds at the sight of her mangled body. Say goodbye to your memories!'

JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

If what Lockhart is attempting is to erase Harry and Ron’s memories such that that they ‘lose their minds’, and if memories are crucial for persistence, then what he is attempting is tantamount to murder. Harry and Ron – as we know them – wouldn’t survive such a loss.

Thankfully, the spell backfires, and so the murder is merely attempted. In backfiring, though, the spell hits Lockhart instead, erasing – seemingly permanently – his own memories, and leaving behind a body with wavy golden hair, the knowledge of how to write in cursive and a penchant for signing autographs. If these are not enough for persistence, then Lockhart’s final victim was himself.

Further Reading

For more on the persistence question, including further reading, see "On Persistence and Memory"

If you're interested in Harry Potter more generally, we have both philosophical and linguistic musings on the matter.

Sometimes, constructing the moral world doesn’t go smoothly. Maybe the hero doesn’t seem to stand for anything good, and so there’s no reason to accept them as the hero. Or perhaps the villain isn’t especially villainous; a sympathetic villain is common enough but something about this character makes it seem like they’re just straightforwardly in the right. There are a few ways a film can deal with this problem. One is to just ignore it and power through, in which case you end up with a thematically-unmotivated conflict. Another is to try and embrace a bad hero or good villain, and end up with a movie espousing some ugly values. I want to talk about a third option, which I call moral warping.

Moral warping is a kind of thematic narrative contrivance, where a character (usually a designated villain) does something out of line with other elements of their characterisation for the sake of making the character conform with their designated role as hero or villain. More specifically, we can think of moral warping as happening when:

1. A character is given a set of motivations and values which define that character’s role in the story, and
2. Those motivations and values seem to dictate a moral role in the story (goodie or baddie), other than the moral role that character actually has, and
3. The character does something to bring them in to line with their moral role, and
4. Importantly, this thing they do to bring them back in to line with their role does not seem to flow from, fit with, or otherwise be reconciled with their initial defining motivations and values.

A good first example for moral warping is Marvel’s Black Panther (2018) and the character of Killmonger. He is introduced in a British museum, correcting the curator about the provenance of stolen artefacts. His origin story is that he was abandoned in Oakland by the Wakandan King T’Chaka after his father became too sympathetic to the Black liberation movement, returns to Wakanda to challenge for political leadership through the politically-recognized method of trial by combat, eliminates the magic herb which sustains the monarchy (declaring himself to be the last king), and states his motivation to be the end of Black oppression worldwide. This motivation obviously resonated with many people, leading to the meme, hashtag, and any number of articles titled “Killmonger was right.”^[1]

Of course, this is only a partial description of the character. Through the movie we are given reasons to think he is not really motivated by liberation. Rather, he is motivated by spite and revenge. Revenge against the royal family for abandoning him, and spite at having had to live in the US rather than Wakanda’s techno-utopia. He suffuses his mission to ship weapons to Black liberation movements with the language of the British empire, promising that the “Sun will never set” on Wakanda.

Moral warping is a kind of thematic narrative contrivance... for the sake of making the character conform with their designated role as hero or villain.

It is easy to see how Killmonger might be subject to moral warping. The character is fundamentally presented as an anti-colonial revolutionary, opposing oppression worldwide, only for that to be undercut by the revelation that he’s just a psychologically-hurt would-be oppressor. This sort of warping is easy for audiences to spot and instinctively unskew because the idea that revolutionaries are just psychologically hurt is nothing new. As Tommy Curry has shown, the idea that Black men are motivated by a simultaneous desire to replicate white oppression while rejecting white values has a long history in the United States.^[2] If the badness of Killmonger’s character is a common slander against Black revolutionaries, it’s easy to mentally class the character’s badness as not fully real. The bad acts are discounted, and Killmonger remains understood as a real revolutionary.

However, despite Killmonger’s badness being a common slander, his badness still fits with his character. The moral world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is defined, in part, by the goodness of hierarchical power structures that isolate power in the hands of a few great people, and the fundamental goodness of the status quo.

(Even when the baddies have control of the status quo this is presented as a problem of infection. Get rid of the baddies and all is well, no need to change how the system actually works. The most extreme case of this is in Captain America: the Winter Soldier where it is revealed that the entire American military and security apparatus has been overtaken by a HYDRA (effectively super Nazis) conspiracy. Once the HYDRA agents are vanquished, the heroes simply take back control of the apparatus.)

In the context of the movie’s moral world, his desires for global revolution and an end to the monarchy were always bad. The character’s villainy is, within the movie’s moral world, continuous with his initial characterization. This is, after all, a movie whose climactic action set piece involves a CIA officer operating military drones to help the rightfully-deposed King T’Challa retake power through a coup. Altogether, then, the character of Killmonger is less a case of moral warping than it is of the movie simply having ugly values.

A better example is found in the previous year’s Marvel offering, Spiderman: Homecoming. Here, the villain is Adrian Toomes, AKA the Vulture. Toomes is a former construction contractor who loses his business after Tony Stark uses his government connections to take over a number of reconstruction projects after the events of Avengers: Assemble (2012). Driven to desperation, Toomes and his construction crew turn to stealing alien technology and selling it as weapons.

Unlike with Killmonger, there isn’t a thematic through line from a construction contractor and father figure disrupted by government corruption to weapons dealer. Rather, Toomes’ criminality seems to be entirely motivated by the need to set him up as a foil for Tony Stark. What’s important here – and what makes this a true case of moral warping – is that absent Toomes stealing and selling weapons, there is nothing in Toomes’ characterization that would make him a baddie.

Toomes’ character, while not as well-developed as Killmonger, still manages to reflect interesting ideas. For example, it’s striking for how closely it matches the subject of China Miéville’s short story Scrap-Iron Man.^[3] In that story, a collective of workers discarded during the 2008 economic downturn put together a suit of scrap metal and set off to fight Tony Stark for being one of the billionaires who rendered their hometown destitute. The characters, like Toomes’ Vulture, are laid off construction workers, build their own armour from scraps, and have a conflict with Tony Stark for being the author of their destitution. The characters represent the same symbols, have the same enemies, and have at least similar motivations. However Toomes must be a villain, and Stark a hero, so Toomes arbitrarily does evil. The character is warped into a villain so that he fits within the movie’s moral world.

References

• Curry, Tommy J. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Temple University Press, 2017).
• Miéville, China. Rejected Pitch, Rejectamentalist Manifesto (2011). https://chinamieville.net/post/4406165249/rejected-pitch

Further Viewing

If you want more media with moral warping, Iron Man 2’s Ivan Vanko is another victim turned evil to affirm Tony Stark’s goodness.

There are also movies which engage moral warping head on. Disney’s Maleficent asks what the titular character might be if she wasn’t forced to be the ‘wicked woman’ in Sleeping Beauty, while X-Men: First Class examines a moral world where Magneto’s radicalism is in the right and Charles Xavier’s liberalism is a kind of complicity.

Flyting – examples of which can be found throughout Northern European literature, from Irish and Scots to English and Norse – was a performative exchange of insults between poets that celebrated their wit, eloquence, and general capacity to be a Bad Bitch. These verbal (and textual) duels typically comprised insults focussing on a foe’s sexual perversion, their lack of courage in battle, or their physical ineptitude, and were frequently, joyously vulgar. Think Christmas dinner conversation with your favourite drunk aunt.

An early example can be found in the Lokasenna (or The Flyting of Loki), a poem from the Poetic Edda which depicts the poetical invectives between Loki and the Æsir (the main pantheon of Gods in Norse mythology). Below we have an excerpt from an exchange between Loki and Bragi (the god of poetry and music no less):

Bragi spake:
"Now were I without | as I am within,
And here in Ægir's hall,
Thine head would I bear | in mine hands away,
And pay thee the price of thy lies."

Loki spake:
"In thy seat art thou bold, | not so are thy deeds,
Bragi, adorner of benches!
Go out and fight | if angered thou feelest,
No hero such forethought has."

Bellows (1936): 151-152.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice? The first line is Loki essentially decrying Bragi as a keyboard warrior: sweating Mountain Dew and explaining comedians’ jokes back to them on Twitter. 

Bragi, conversely, does seem somewhat less well-stocked in the ol’ wit department: “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” he says: “Don’t make me get off my chair! I swear, if I have to stand up! Mum! He’s doing it again!” I squared up to  my grandma in this fashion once; she punched me in the throat.

Which brings us to Valhalla (2020). Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018) was a phenomenal recreation of the ancient Hellenic world – just ask this archaeologist – and they’ve taken a similarly well-researched approach to Valhalla: from silver coinage to longship design. “But it was wildly historically inaccurate: that’s not how kings were chosen!” I hear you shout from your basement, dribbling soda. I don’t care: back to the bench with you! (I will concede, however, that male Eivor is not nearly as hot or funny as Odyssey’s Alexios, and no I will not surrender the tannoy in Tesco until everyone shopper knows this).

For me (and therefore for you), the most notable historical inclusion was, of course, flyting. These stats-boosting poetic duels are common throughout the map in both Norway and England, and will test your ability to detect rhyme and intuit metre. Some bold-as-brass NPC drops a phat insult against you, and you – absolutely raging by this point – have to select your response from three available choices. The correct one is that which complements both the NPC’s end-rhyme (final sounds which rhyme e.g. 'I serenaded the old woman who lives across from my door | She bade me “shut the fuck up” and called me a whore') and its number of feet.

Feet, for the unfamiliar, are a basic unit of measurement in poetry: collections of stressed and unstressed syllables which structure the rhythm of a poem. For example, the word unite is comprised of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Typically, these are characterised as dee – short, unstressed – and dum: longer, stressed. Whether a syllable is stressed or not is dependent on the emphasis placed on it during an utterance: for me, the emphasis is placed on the second syllable when I say ‘unite’: dee-dum. This may not be the case for everyone: heretics undoubtedly live among us.

“[A]dorner of benches” – is there a more devastating accusation of cowardice?

Now, there are all kinds of feet (beyond nice ones like mine and everyone else’s gross ones). ‘U-nite’ for example, is an iamb: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Byron’s She Walks in Beauty is a nice example of iambic metre: “She walks in beau-ty, like the night.” A trochee, conversely, is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable e.g. Gar-den. Poe’s famous The Raven is primarily written in trochaic metre: “Once u-pon a mid-night drea-ry, while I pon-dered, weak and wea-ry.” And you certainly aren’t limited to two syllables. An anapaest is two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one e.g. O-ver-come. You’ll find an example of this type of foot in Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib – absolute banger if you haven’t read it: “When the blue wave rolls night-ly on deep Gali-lee.” And they said an undergrad in English literature was a waste. I may have debt and limited job opportunities but behold! My mountain of incredibly google-able knowledge!

 Armed with this understanding of Valhalla’s flyting victory conditions, let’s consider this early encounter with Manning, Fighter of Wolves. A burly type, I was initially surprised by his eloquence – shame on me. His opening volley is: “Have you ever seen muscles as massive as mine?” And to be fair, his muscles are sizeable and inspire in me unclean thoughts. Our task is then to select from the three options the ending which best complements this line and, of course, delivers a devasting riposte. Listening to the museful Manning, he is using iambic metre: unstressed syllable, stressed syllable. Our three options are:

“You have the form of a very large swine.”

Wrong: this is in fact a savage put-down from my mother when I’m just trying to enjoying a swim at the pool. And it’s not entirely iambic – I’m hearing a couple of cheeky trochees in there – and there certainly are not enough feet (said the cannibal to the chef). 

“I’m not awed by your muscles, but shocked by your pride.”

Also wrong: a yearbook entry from my favourite PE teacher. “I’m not awed” reads as anapaestic to me, and “pride” doesn’t work as an end-rhyme.  

“What you make up in muscles, you’re lacking in spine.”

Boom! We have a winner! “Spine” compliments the end-rhyme of “mine,” and you can comfortably read it aloud as iambic. Also a direct quote from my concerned chiropractor. 

...these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games...

Beyond Valhalla, we can find numerous examples of flyting in modern media. In the final installation of Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy, The Ship of the Dead, the eponymous protagonist flytes to the death with Loki (an event involving body-shrinking and walnuts, I don’t know).

In the Monkey Island video game series (and especially The Secret of Monkey Island), flyting is integral to victory in sword-fighting: as in Valhalla, you must counter your opponent’s invectives with insulting (and, in the sequel, rhyming) ripostes. A sufficiently stinging jibe will throw your enemy off and give you the upper hand in battle, which, if maintained for long enough, secures you the win. Memorable exchanges include:

“I once owned a dog that was smarter than you!”

“He must have taught you everything you know!”

And:

“You fight like a dairy farmer!”

“How appropriate. You fight like a cow!”

Perhaps most heartening is that these kinds of poetic and literary pursuits are steadily finding their way into more games with meaningful narratological and ludological function: see also the haiku quests in Ghost of Tsushima.

And if you’ve an interest in the ritual insulting of others (and if you don’t: why do you hate fun?), I would recommend The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (the earliest example of flyting in Scots: c.1500 baby), which has been suggested to possess the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as an insult. A particularly delightful line is Kennedie’s accusation that Dunbar is: “a shit without wit, only cheap tawdry tricks.” The perfect Twitter bio, frankly. 

References

• Bellows, H. The Poetic Edda (Bibliolife, 2011).
• Dunbar, W. & Kennedie, W. The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie (OUP, 2021).

Why should this bother us? After all, movies of historical events are full of things that didn’t happen. Conversations are invented, thoughts speculated, and perspectives manufactured. Very little of the dialogue spoken in Chicago 7 was actually uttered by the historical figures portrayed on film, so why would some scenes and not others stand out as particularly wrong? To put it another way, what is it that makes us care about the historical accuracy of some scenes more than others?

The natural place to start is the idea that some fictionalized scenes make the movie worse, but others do not. We don’t care about the smaller inventions because they don’t substantially affect how the movie goes, they’re more like the little cogs that keep the rest of the movie ticking. Inaccuracies in the big showpiece scenes, on the other hand, are the real substance of the movie. If the big scenes are bad, that’s much more significant in making the whole film bad, so it’s the big scenes that we care about.

Now, we have to be careful about not falling prey to a circularity here. What I’ve just written could be interpreted as saying that we care about the big scenes because they determine the goodness or badness of the movie, and those scenes determine the goodness or badness of the movie because we care about them. To dodge this problem, I need to offer an additional way to think about the big scenes being good or bad. For this I want to reach for aesthetic cognitivism.

Aesthetic cognitivism has two components. The first is the idea that works of art can have cognitive content. This means that art can be a source of understanding about the world, and provides us the sort of content which is the basis of understanding. The second part of aesthetic cognitivism is that works of art can be better or worse as works of art based on their cognitive content.

A common type of cognitive content is what’s called a “cognitive-affective perspective.” This means that a film does not just present the viewer with a bare set of facts, but it presents an emotionally-laden way of viewing a subject justified by certain information. In the case of Cinderella, for example, we are invited to feel sympathetic towards the titular Cinderella, and that sympathy is justified by the suffering inflicted upon her by her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.

This starts to help us understand why we care about some scenes in a movie but not others. The small scenes, the cogs that just keep the film moving, don’t necessarily provide cognitive-affective perspectives on the important historical events. And to the extent that they do contribute to such perspectives on the characters, their contributions are minor: hallway dialogue developing characters or a moment alone to show how a character is feeling. On the other hand, significant scenes like the climactic honouring of the dead in Chicago 7, play a very significant role in determining the cognitive-affective perspective a film offers of its subjects.

What is the perspective offered by that courtroom scene? First of all, it shows the protagonists as righteous. Specifically, they’re righteous because of a commitment to a set of higher values of justice and unity centred on a patriotic belief in the value of America. This unity is endorsed by (and therefore the righteousness is extended to) not just the defendants and observers, but also the prosecutor.

It’s a powerful, well-constructed scene with a very significant problem: it never happened.

The patriotic commitment of the scene is the culmination of the film’s narrative which emphasizes the patriotic commitment of the characters: Abbie Hoffman talks on the stand about the greatness of American institutions, Jerry Rubin defends a flag-waving protester from a sexual assault by a bunch of frat bros, and the reveal of Tom Hayden’s radical commitment begins with defending a teenager ascending a flagpole. Bobby Seale, leader of the Black Panther Party, is granted a mistrial after his treatment by the judge is so egregious that the prosecutor Schultz is moved to outrage. Altogether, then, the film offers a vision of the defendants, especially Hoffman and Hayden, as true patriots who believe in the strength and virtue of the American ideal. Their patriotism is so strong that the abuses of the court move everyone to outrage, and that outrage becomes a source of patriotic unity. This culminates in the film combining the symbols of a defiant raising of the fist with standing to mourn America’s war dead.

So what’s the problem?

Cognitivism holds that art can be a source of understanding. To offer proper understanding of something, what the film offers about that thing must be true. The patriotic narrative is not true. In fact, it is strikingly false. While Hayden did record America’s war dead in his notebook, he did not record only America’s war dead. He recorded all the war dead, especially those of the Vietnamese. His opposition to the war was not rooted in an American patriotism, but rather an opposition to war as an imperial project. Hayden saw this imperial project as fundamental to the United States, and so opposing the war meant opposing the entirety of the American state structure. The movie inverts the entire moral mission of the defendants. They are not patriots driven to outrage by the corruption of American virtues, as the film presents, but universally-minded political activists driven by an opposition to inextricable American vices.^[1]

And what of the message of unity? The prosecutor Schultz, it turns out, felt no such sympathy for the defendants. In fact, interviews conducted with Schultz leading up to the release of the film show that he’s still convinced of the righteousness of the trial, and the criminality of the defence.^[2] In light of Schultz’s lasting commitment to the righteousness of the prosecution, the film’s presented unity between him and the defendants seems particularly misplaced.

Altogether, then, the film presents a cognitive-affective perspective that seems to get important facts wrong. It therefore presents an incorrect understanding of historical events, which undermines its cognitive value. To this we might add that since The Trial of the Chicago 7 is specifically of a genre that cares about accurately depicting historical events, this cognitive disvalue is particularly significant. If the movie is bad at one of the things it is specifically supposed to be good at, then that seems significant.

However, there’s still something missing. When the film misrepresents the moral mission of the defendants, it seems to be doing something not just factually wrong, but morally wrong. The issue is not just that the movie is worse as a movie, but rather that it (or the filmmakers) have committed some more serious moral offence. I believe this can be addressed by appealing again to cognitive-affective perspectives. Specifically, we can say that the cognitive-affective perspectives the film provides are not merely inaccurate to historical events, they’re morally inaccurate too.

So what’s the problem?

Chicago 7’s moral inaccuracy is grounded in its historical inaccuracy. This is to say that the perspective the film offers is wrong in such a way that the factual wrongness is itself morally bad. Some of this is part of a disrespect for the historical characters. Hayden, Hoffman, Seale, and the rest of the defendants ended up on trial for acting on political convictions which were deeply important to them. Misrepresenting their important personal convictions consequently fails to respect how their actions followed from their values. This insult is heightened by the film inverting their values, turning them in to dedicated patriots.

There is also a deeper moral wrong. The film presents a cognitive-affective perspective not just on the characters but on a deeper set of values. The film presents a moralized view of the world which centres the value of American institutions, American lives, and American patriotism. The greatest sins in the world of Chicago 7 are not of the mass murder that Hoffman, Hayden and Seale actually opposed but rather disunity and procedural impropriety. In showing Hayden and Hoffman as patriots and Schultz as sympathetic, the historical inaccuracy of the movie turns in to moral offence, not just promoting questionable moral values but doing so at the expense of a more penetrating and urgent moral criticism.

This, then, gives us our twofold answer to the question of why we care about the historical inaccuracy in The Trial of the Chicago 7. The film does not just relay to us a set of historical facts, but also presents an emotionally-laden perspective on those facts. The inaccuracy of the facts, and the inaptitude of the perspective, undercuts the film’s cognitive value: by presenting a false vision of past motivations the film thereby presents an incorrect understanding of historical events. This inaccuracy is morally loaded, as it promotes not just an inaccurate factual understanding but also a bad set of moral values. This helps explain both why we might think historical inaccuracy makes a film worse and also why historical inaccuracy is a moral offence that extends beyond questions of a film’s value.

Further Reading

If you wish to delve further, see chapters 7 and 8 of Berys Gaut's Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford University Press (2007).

If you want to explore other aspects of philosophy of film, you might start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy entry on Philosophy of Film.

…and, more recently, financial advisors.

There are lots of interesting features of Stoicism – and indeed, the other ancient philosophical schools (we are the Epicurean Cure after all) – but I want to focus on one idea in particular and one neat (and seemingly overlooked) representation of it in popular media. First, a caveat: this piece is both brief and rather rough-and-ready, so see the further reading below for more precision and to dive deeper.

In 2001, K-Pax was released: a film about a psychiatric hospital with a patient who claimed to be an alien from the eponymous planet of K-Pax. I’m loathe to recommend a film starring Kevin Spacey, but thankfully the whole script is available online, so if you’re interested you can read it there and mentally substitute whatever person you like into the lead role.

At the very end of the film, there’s a voiceover from the main character – the possible alien – with advice for his psychiatrist.^[3] First he tells us that the K-Paxians know something that humans don’t:

The Universe will expand, then collapse back on itself – then expand again. It will repeat this process again and again, forever.

At first this just sounds like a Big Bang/Big Crunch sort of picture, but in the context of what comes next, the Stoic influence becomes obvious.

Stoic doctrine speaks of a

cosmic ‘fire’ which combined the creative functions of light and warmth – this latter including that of the warm ‘breath’ or pneuma (which in its Latinized form became our word ‘spirit’) that served as the vitalizing force of the Stoic world. God is sometimes defined as a ‘creative fire that proceeds methodically to the world’s coming to be’.

Brunschwig & Sedley, p. 170

This ‘coming to be’ isn’t a singular occurrence. For the Stoics, the world comes into being and then ends again in cycles.  The end is a state of total fieriness or godliness called ekpyrosis (often translated as ‘conflagration’), during which the deity sets up the new cycle.

Now there’s nothing there to worry about, just yet. It’s quite nice to think that if things don’t shake out as well as they could this time round that we (or others like us) would get another shot next cycle. But as the voiceover from K-Pax tells us, that’s not what we should expect:

What you don’t know is that when the Universe expands again, everything will be as it was before. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through again. Over and over, forever.

The Stoics thought so too:

The deity, being supremely wise, has no reason to do things differently from one world to the next. So successive worlds are indistinguishable from each other, even in their details.

B&S, p. 171.

I’ve written this sentence infinitely many times in previous cycles, and will write it again infinitely more times in subsequent cycles.

So, you might ask, why bother? Why study for an exam, if whether I pass or fail is predetermined (and not just now, but for infinitely many repetitions?) Why go to the doctor when I’m sick – I’ll either get better or I won’t. This is the charge of fatalism, and the critics of Stoics raised the same objections, sometimes called ‘The Lazy Argument’ or ‘The Idle Argument’.

Undeterred, the Stoic Chrysippus replied that outcomes are not fated no matter what, but rather ‘co-fated’ along with other factors, such as our decisions, actions, and dispositions. That you are you – rather than someone else, with a shorter temper, a tendency to make decisions by rolling dice, or a preference for honeycomb ice-cream – factors in to how the world is. Fate gives us a push, says Chrysippus, but it works through us; how fate unrolls depends on the kinds of beings we are. (Editor’s note: I’m paraphrasing here, and Chrysippus spoke Ancient Greek.^[4])

We might understand it like this: it is determined by the deity that I am who I am. But if I had been different, things would have turned out differently.

There is nothing new under a sun which, even itself, is not new.

One of the reasons people might be worried by the idea of fate is that they think it’s only appropriate to blame or praise someone for their actions – to hold them accountable – if the action originated with them.^[5] For the Stoics, it’s appropriate to praise and blame people even though the world is determined, because the kinds of people we are makes a difference to how the world turns out. Fate ultimately causes the kinds of people we are, and what happens to us: “how we respond, however predictable in the light of our own past history and present character, is ‘in our power’: the responsibility for it is our own.”^[6]

Scholars have different views on the nuances of Stoic determinism and what we should take from it. For instance,

In embracing this strange conceit, the Stoics may well have been attracted by its moral implications: don’t dream of what you could do, or might have been able to do, ‘in another life’, because another life would be just the same as this one. There is nothing new under a sun which, even itself, is not new.

B&S, p. 171.

But the message from K-Pax is slightly more upbeat:

[M]y advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because… this time… is all you have.

I might have typed this sentence infinitely times before, but to me, in my chair, it feels like the first time, and it always will. Fingers crossed I’ve avoided any typos.  

References

• Bobzien, S. Determinism and freedom in Stoic philosophy, (Oxford: OUP, 1998).
• Brunschwig & Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophy in Sedley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy, (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), pp. 151-183.

Further Reading

You can find out more about Chrysippus in Book VII Chapter 7 of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers.

If you want to read some Stoic philosophy straight from the Ancient Stoics, you could start with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic.

For a general overview of philosophy in the period there are a lot of options, but one that easily fits in the handbag is Terence Irwin’s Classical Thought (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1989).

The Epicurean Cure is a celebration of thinking critically and robustly about the media we love. Further down you’ll find a selection of works by BAME authors: those that sit with worn spines on our bookcases; that we’ve read to the children in our lives; that we’ve pressed into the hands of friends; that we’ve sat up into the wee hours consuming. We’ve also included a series of links to other media created by BAME people or that give context to the current protests (those aren’t mutually exclusive!). Buy them from your local bookseller, borrow them from your local library, watch them, play them.

However, that’s not all you can do. We can’t speak to the lived experience of BAME people so must defer to those who can, and the overwhelming message we’re hearing is to donate, so that’s what we’ve done. Here are some resources with suggestions of where you can direct your time and funds:

• “Dear White People, This is What We Want You to Do”
• “A list of resources for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement”
• “How to donate to anti-racism charities after George Floyd’s death and how else you can show support”
• “Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay, But They’re Not”
• “Performative Allyship is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)”
• “5 Racist Anti-Racism Responses “Good” White Women Give to Viral Posts”
• “How to protest safely during a pandemic”
• “5 points to consider before going to a black lives matter protest in London or the UK”

Our favourites

Poems by Maya Angelou

The philosopher’s well-worn copy collects four volumes of Maya Angelou’s poetry: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Diiie; Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well; And Still I Rise; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?

Her 17-year-old self marked favourites with dots in the corner of the pages, but every time she opens the book something new resonates. Zen Pencils' Gavin Aung Than illustrated “Phenomenal Woman”, and it’s well worth a look.

Young, Gifted and Black by Jamia Wilson, illustrated by Andrea Pippins

This gorgeous picture book depicts fifty-two black legends – one for each week of the year. It’s brightly coloured, uplifting and covers musicians, politicians, athletes and other important figures from all over the world.

You can find more picture books celebrating BAME people in Quarto’s "Anti-racist books for kids” list.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

The first in a trilogy of stories about Binti, the linguist defies anyone not to read it in a single sitting (also it’s a novella, so you really don’t have an excuse). Tense, textured, thoughtful – Okorafor’s gift for characterisation keeps this story in your thoughts long after the last page.

Rosewater by Tade Thompson

The first of a sci-fi trilogy set in Nigeria, Rosewater is widely acclaimed and it’s not difficult to see why. Both the philosopher and the linguist amongst us read and enjoyed it, and we tend to disagree about books, so that speaks for itself.

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin

These are excellent, simpliciter. The trilogy is described as ‘science fantasy’ and has fascinating world-building and multi-layered female characters. Jemisin was the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, which she did for the first in the trilogy: The Fifth Season. She went on to win the Hugo for both sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky.

The only reason our own copies don’t feature in the image at the top of the page is that they’re constantly being loaned out to friends. The web dev waxes lyrical about how great they are – the rest of us agree.

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi

This is a phenomenally easy-to-enjoy read. Oyeyemi took time off school to finish it and the linguist is glad she (temporarily) said screw you to maths. A coming-of-age (sort of ghost) story set against the background of cultural upheaval; it was a pleasure to read.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge and The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla

We’re grouping these two together for two reasons: (1) they’re both accessible, important insights into current society, history, and the lives of people of colour in the UK; and (2) there’s currently a petition to have them added to the GSCE reading list (which you can sign here). There’s an American version of the latter – The Good Immigrant USA – edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman.

The Fat Black Woman’s Poems by Grace Nichols

We’d be remiss not to include Grace Nichols’s poetry: often hilarious, regularly moving, and always powerful. It was, and continues to be, an important joy to read.

More Options

• “Twelve books that give context to current protests [reading list]”
• “10 documentaries to watch about race instead of asking a person of colour to explain things for you”
• “7 games by black developers you can support right now”
• “More Black bookshops and publishers you should know about”
• “Here are four things that you can do to de-colonize your bookshelf this year”
• “Anti-racism resources”

If anyone has further suggestions we’re happy to share them, and if there’s anything in particular we can do, we’d appreciate hearing it.